I’ve been having some fun within the frame of intense work in writing a hypertext story each day for a grand total of one hundred through the summer if I can manage to keep it up. Even if I don’t, I’ve been forced to learn and relearn elements of story through the deadlines and the desire to come up with something new, something fresh and different than whatever I’ve been doing before.
The real roadblocks for me here are the inexperience with working within the hypertext format so each story needs double duty thinking. On top of that is the process of exporting each work into .html form and ensure that’s it’s working online. Sometimes in changing the titles, colors, etc. from one story to the next, a simple semi-colon goes missing, or a link has lost a character and it ends up pointing mid-story to an Error 404 page. Then there’s a lot of detective effort and time in tracking it down. The final kicker: I get to read it online in presention form and get itchy to edit. That takes several clicks to open the server page for the files and wait- we’re not done–make the changes to the hard drive .html file and the Tinderbox version as well.
So in the last couple of days, just when I was about to throw in the towel, inspiration came in the form of magical realism; a fun thing to do when story gets too serious and too formal. I tend to get “Byzantine” with words sometimes and overly explanatory and magical realism lets you cut that off at the pass. It’s a “because I say so” tool for the writer, somewhat like freeform poetry where the creative force negates most (not all) stringent and smothering restrictions on writing. It makes it more fun.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology